N3: Solidarity Against Austerity Call to Action - Enough is Enough

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N3: Solidarity Against Austerity Call to Action - Enough is Enough

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Purpose

Our Dreams Don’t Fit in Their Ballot Boxes!

No to austerity! Yes to reclaiming our communities!

Occupy Portland and Portland Action Lab invite all people to participate in a national call to action to say NO! to Austerity and YES! to building our collective power. Business and our governments hoard wealth, privatize our communities, and burden us with enormous debt. This is AUSTERITY and we say Enough is Enough!

On November 2nd and 3rd (N3) we will mobilize and march, voting with our feet by taking direct action to interrupt the normal course of business. Our power is in our neighborhoods, building alternatives, and taking to the streets!

We call on all participants in the Occupy movement, rank-and-file union members, students, our elders and people-at-large to organize creatively and return to our public spaces with this message on the weekend before the election. Our communities will make our own decisions and control our own resources, no matter who is elected.

We are not alone; austerity is a consequence of a failed economic system and people around the world are rising up. We act in solidarity and take inspiration from the peoples of Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, South Africa, Quebec, Chile, and beyond[1] who are fighting austerity and the destruction of their communities.

WHAT IS AUSTERITY?

AUSTERITY is a program within our economic system made up of:

  1. Cuts to public services and benefits
  2. Increase in debt people must take on to survive
  3. Privatization of all public resources

Politicians say that austerity is needed to reduce the deficit, which was created by a combination of 2 “wars on terror” and tax cuts for the wealthy. Really, austerity is based in cutting the social safety net and forcing working people to carry the burdens while the 1% hoard wealth.

WHO BENEFITS?

Politicians from both parties work with big business to hemorrhage money from the public into the pockets of the wealthy. Business and our governments hoard wealth, privatize our communities, and burden us with enormous debt.[2]

WHO SHOULD PAY?

Resist Austerity!

Rapidly rising deficits at both the federal and state and local government levels, along with prospective long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programmes, have triggered a one-sided austerity-focused class war in the USA and around the globe. A coalition of the richest and most economically powerful segments of society, conservative politicians who represent their interests and right-wing populist groups like the Tea Party has demanded that deficits be eliminated by severe cuts at all levels of government in spending that either supports the poor and the middle class or funds crucial public investment. It also demands tax cuts for the rich and for business. These demands constitute a deliberate attempt to destroy the New Deal project, begun in the 1930s, whose goal was to subject capitalism to democratic control.

(The current) deficit crisis is the result of a shift from the New Deal-based economic model of the early postwar period to today’s neoliberal, free-market model. The new model has generated slow growth, rising inequality and rising deficits. Rising deficits in turn created demands for austerity. After tracing the long-term evolution of our current deficit crisis, (the report's author argues) that this crisis should be resolved primarily by raising taxes on upper-income households and large corporations, cutting war spending and adopting a Canadian- or European-style health care system. Calls for massive government spending cuts should be seen as what they are—an attack by the rich and powerful against the basic interests of the American people.

--The great austerity war: what caused the US deficit crisis and who should pay to fix it?

Solidarity against Austerity!

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